[2.0.1] Dual Flame Totem: Going Spell Damage vs. Going Crit

Upon returning to Wraeclast for The Awakening (Patch 2.0), my first inclination was to play a safe but effective build that can bring me to endgame content. My thought process behind the idea was that I’d be able to farm up currency during the fresh economy courtesy of the new leagues that were released with The Awakening (in this case, Tempest, which follows the hardcore ruleset, and Warbands, which follows the softcore ruleset). With so many changes that to the game since my last run at Path of Exile (I last played in patch 1.3) including (but not limited to) the following:

Crafting and the concept of masters

New zone mods and league rulesets

New monster mods

The concept of hideouts and customizing them

New skills and items with the introduction of several uniques

The concept of jewels and jewel passives in the ever-growing passive tree

and most importantly, the introduction of the insane Act 4 (Acts 1-3 seem like a vacation and then shit hits the fan in Act 4, seriously GGG, what were you thinking?!)

… my first thought was to spend some time researching various forum threads to figure out what build I’d like to follow and play through in an attempt to learn about the new content that I had previously missed out on.

For those of you who don’t know me to well, I prefer to play ranged spell-based characters as they tend to be less gear reliant and resonate with my playstyle more. If I had to pick one Path of Exile character class as my playstyle, I’d end up choosing the Witch. I am notoriously known for playing builds that many others tend to find rather boring including several dual totem builds (previously played several Dual Totem Spark-based builds) and then my previously highest character, a classic summoner! After looking around, I came across LiftingNerdBro’s Dual Flame Totem, Blood Magic build, which is optimally played best by none other than a Witch!

My first run at Tempest with the dual flame totem build resulted in my unfortunate demise in Cruel Act 4 (Thanks Burning Man!) In an effort to learn the content without constantly rerolling and doing low-level content I decided to play a character in Warbands and roll the same in Tempest as well, playing side-by-side and learning the content then executing correctly on Tempest. To spice things up, I came up with a genius vary the builds slightly and understand the core concept of the build, its scalability, its strengths and weaknesses, and ultimately how to improve upon the build for even further end-game content and min-max everything I could. I haven’t quite gotten to full-end game content thanks to GGG bumping the end-game content to even higher than before (highest map being 78 before and now being bumped to 82 with the addition of several new zones/maps/mods).

I ended up choosing the classic Fire Damage Dual Flame Totem build, which can be found here and the Crit Dual Flame Totem build which can be found here.

So a quick breakdown of the stats for the passive attributes of each build:

Preliminary Thoughts

Fire Damage Dual Flame Totem

The fire damage based dual flame totem build is more noob-friendly, easier to gear and better for self-found/new economy situations. Playing in the Tempest league (the league where I tested this build), I managed to get 6.5k DPS by Act 4 Merciless compared to 3.8k DPS on my crit-based dual flame totem build. Not only that but my character was generally tankier and safer to play (which I found a bit interesting actually). I would attribute a large part of the increased survivability to Combat Stamina and to Sentinel which I ended up picking up earlier on the fire damage based build. That being said, the falloff seems to be quite hard for scaling damage later into the game because the multiplier on the damage isn’t as scalable. You’ll specifically notice a bigger dip in not only DPS but also on survivability post-74 maps. With all said and done though, it’s an excellent build to use to farm currency in a fresh economy with low budget gear requirements. If you are looking to roll a build in Tempest or Warbands now though, unless you’re using it specifically to farm currency low-budget, it is not the best choice in my opinion.

Crit Dual Flame Totem

Conversely, it appears that the crit-based build has higher scaling potential as one might expect. The higher I level and the more end-game content I reach, it seems that the crit is just scaling very quickly, which is great news for me. To be more specific, the way crit works, if you don’t have much of it, it isn’t all that useful. Eventually you pass a certain threshold of crit chance and with constant barrage of fire coming from the Flame totem, not to mention, you have two of them, the number of times you crit goes up which greatly increases your DPS. This coupled with your crit multiplier, you’re going to end up hitting like a truck. My character, as randomly and poorly geared as it is now, is being purely carried through the sheer damage it can put out from a distance. Since my crit-based character is on Warbands, I haven’t bothered optimizing the character at all. My DPS in its current state, which is close to 15K DPS per totem (30K DPS total) is enough to carry me through 74-75 maps fairly easily (I just have to manage my pots well and more importantly positioning).

I have seen and would like to explore variants to the crit build to min/max the damage output, which I can delve into and look at more in-depth at a later time. These variants particularly seemed to have foregone the investment into the Marauder area and instead opted to go towards the Shadow side of the passive tree for additional crit/damage nodes along with some health nodes there instead. It should be noted that they were all very expensive versions of the build though, including one which was a low-life crit build. Until next time, happy theorycrafting!

Shout Out to LiftingNerdBro (who recently got Twitch partnership status!) – catch him on his Twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/liftingnerdbro and to Damelon from the Path of Exile forums for his input in the crit iteration of the build.